the timboucher experience

Both of these items were sent to me by a reader named Ian: First is Earthmine, Inc, which seeks to create a “spatially accurate, truly 3D inventory of our world.” They’re calling their technology the missing link between information and places.

I see a company like Earthmine becoming a big deal as more people catch on to enriched data layers overlaid against geospatial data from the real world. You can see traces of it already in Google’s maps, which now feature links to photos and Wikipedia entries (among other things) telesymbolinkly latched to actual geographic locations. What Earthmine and Google (with its layers in Google Earth, I believe) are doing - and I’m sure they have competitors - is creating the technological bridges which will lead us into fully immersive augmented reality spaces: mixed realms, as I’ve been calling them. Places where information floats by, whether its across your cell phone screen, your heads-up display, or in your sensorium itself.

Technology like this, of course, can be used in so many different ways that it makes one’s head spin. Which is why I’m thankful Ian sent along a second link to a concept which dovetails into what we’ve described above, and poses an interesting possibility. Ian explains:

[...] basically, the idea is city-as-cyborg, where our environment becomes a sensory web we can tap into, creating a feedback loop of information-over-time that allows us to better see our impact on our environments.

Of course, we can already do that with the power of our senses, but its fascinating to watch ecological metaphors overtake the world of technology, presenting the average technoconsumer the ability to become something of a digital shaman, accessing and affecting hidden realms and networks of more-than-human information.

• An Internet for Smart Objects
• GPS, The Walkabout & Augmented Reality [Tech Trends]
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